U.S. President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday that the White House said expands the definition of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship and bans “birth tourism.”
U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is once more trying to limit the number of people who are born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he’s ready to try again.
The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration.
He said one will limit the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States.
A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.
Text of the order released by the White House said people planning to engage in birth tourism in the United States will be denied entry to the country and may be permanently barred.
The secretary of homeland security may exempt a foreign national on humanitarian grounds or when that person’s entry is in the national interest, according to the order.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s previous efforts to declare that children born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily aren’t American citizens, and upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship.
On Trump’s first day in office of his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, which allows anyone born in the United States to automatically become an American citizen.
Trump’s administration was immediately sued by opponents who said the executive order went against the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which makes anyone born in the country a citizen, with very limited exceptions.
The executive order was blocked by several lower courts and never took effect.
In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote. But the vote was too close for many immigration advocates and legal observers who felt the legal question of birthright citizenship was a long-settled issue.
No U.S. law outright bars birth tourism, but a federal regulation implemented in 2020 during Trump’s first term prohibits using temporary tourist and business visas for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a newborn. People who engage in birth tourism schemes could be prosecuted for fraud or other related crimes.
There are no official figures tallying the number of foreigners who come to the U.S. for the explicit purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their children, or the cost to taxpayers.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, estimated in an analysis in 2020 that between 20,000-25,000 mothers came to the U.S. for birth tourism in a year-long period between 2016-2017.
There were 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2025.
—With additional files from Reuters
Based on reporting by Global News.